How do you access a website running on localhost from iPhone browser

Question

I am working on a mobile website and would like to test it using my iPhone browser. My Windows 7 machine and iPhone are on the same wireless network. How do I access localhost from the iPhone? Right now I get a 404 error.

Trevethick

make sure that you turned off firewall – Hagerman

On Another/Mobile Device on same network, visit: "IP_Address:PORT". The details are in the answers that follow. – Mich

Answer 1

Accessing localhost from the iPhone will simply do a loopback / try to connect to itself (If it supports that?).

What you need to do is find the IP of your desktop machine (e.g. If Windows, go to the Command Prompt and type ipconfig or go to Network and Sharing Centre and look up connection status.

Once you have your ip, simply visit that from your browser e.g. http://192.168.0.102.

You may need to open up port 80 (or whatever port your website is running on) in the inbound security of your firewall if you are running one.

Note: don't forget the app's port if what you want is to debug the app in your iPhone's browser like: http://192.168.0.102:3000. In this example 3000 is the default port used by ReactJS.

Outride

"Accessing localhost from the iPhone will simply do a loopback / try to connect to itself (If it supports that?)" - Of course it supports. Almost same answer as mine ahahahaha ;) – Heurlin

@Cuss As I phone has no real need for it, I didn't know if it has a hosts table type thing where they would configure localhost. And, I should be saying your answer is the same as me! – Outride

Iphone, like other unix, symbian and win based devices, have the need of loopback because of some applications that connects with others over TCP/IP Loopback address. Almost all devices with network has the loopback ability. – Heurlin

Wil and CuSS - Thanks for your suggestions. My first attempt to access the website running in IIS on my Win7 laptop via the IP address resulted in 404. I'll check the firewall settings. Any other checks (traces) I can run to figure out the issue? – Trevethick

If testing is for wordpress then we have to change website url to http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/wordpress in wordpress Dashboard. – Jorrie

Actually, try accessing localhost:port to an open port on your machine. It works on my setup. – Whiles

Not work if your server using virtualhost (multiple host name) – Spanker

IINM, this won't work for debugging progressive web apps, which usually have service workers, since service workers require https, and that requires certificates. With Android, it forwards the ports so that you can still use localhost and so don't need the hassle of getting certificates. – Reredos

It's timing out for me: ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT. Perhaps my firewall isn't set up right? – Appetitive

on paper this sounds simple and straightforward, but for some reason doesn't work for me, despite machines being on same network and using the correct local ip. (The app is running on a mac, trying to open it on iPhone). – Strychnic

to add on my previous comment: it depends on the app. For a Nuxt.js app like mine, for example, you need to follow this too: debbie.codes/blog/nuxt-configure-server-to-see-site-on-mobile – Strychnic

Answer 2

If you are using Mac, go to System Preferences > Network and use your IP address instead of localhost. You can also use port number. In my case, I have a server running on port 1448 and I can preview 192.168.1.241:1448 using iPhone.

Speak

This answer is a perfect balance of comp sci geek vs visual design geek. Well done. – Humbert

Hold down the Alt/Option key while clicking on the Wi-Fi menu bar item. This gives a bunch of extra information about your connection including your local IP address. – Pairoar

Not work if your server using virtualhost (multiple host name) – Spanker

2018: Network Utility > Info (first tab) > IP Address (under Interface information) - it works! thnku – Catha

To access a development sandbox, I had to change the sandbox host to 0.0.0.0 instead of localhost. https://mcmap.net/q/88045/-how-to-get-access-to-webpack-dev-server-from-devices-in-local-network – Gameto

In my case typing the address directly on the iPhone didn't work (I tried with only the IP, with http:// and https:// but it wouldn't work), so I've typed the URL (with https://) on Chrome on my machine, and then shared the URL using the QR code (but I guess any other option would work). – Thickset

Answer 3

you can try ngrok.io. Works on same principle as localtunnel.
Download the application for your os. and try to run like:

for linux:

./ngrok http 8000

8000 is port number your application is running on.

for windows:

 ngrok.exe http 8000

Vagus

This may theoretically answer the question, but it would be best to include the essential parts of the answer here for future users, and provide the link for reference. Link-dominated answers can become invalid through link rot. – Trotskyism

Thanks, I edited the answer. But it is still link dominated. However one can always google in case link is broken. – Vagus

and expose vulnerability issue) – Mudpack

Answer 4

Try this:

1. Press Windows + R
2. Open cmd
3. Run ipconfig (Old) ifconfig (New)
4. Check your wireless network card IP
5. Go to iPhone and navigate to "http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/" through your browser.
   (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is your IP)

Note: you must set permission on your firewall settings, if any.

Heurlin

Answer 5

If you're using a Mac -

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac via USB.

2. Go to Network Utility (cmd+space and type "network utility")

3. Go to the "Info" tab

4. Click on the drop down menu that says "Wi-Fi" and select "iPhone USB" as shown in the photo.

5. You'll find an IP address like "xxx.xxx.xx.xx" or similar. Open Safari browser on your iPhone and enter IP_address:port_number

   Example: 169.254.72.86:3000

[NOTE: If the IP address field is blank, make sure your iPhone is connected via USB, quit Network Utility, open it again and check for the IP address.]

Warning: Network Utility is deprecated since macOS Big Sur.

Mantle

Works like a charm. Another cool feature is that you are able use the inspector for development. – Electrotechnics

If you cannot see the IP address do the following: 1. switch on personal hot spot on the iPhone (being connected via USB) 2. switch off the wifi on your mac. This way the iPhone turns to router and you will see the IP address again. – Electrotechnics

This is the only answer that worked on my 10s, thank you so much! – Prominent

This works, but seems unnecessary since using the mac's IP address works just as well (i.e.: the IP address that you get when you're both on the same WiFi and you select Wi-Fi (en0) from the above list). – Rehabilitate

when I open Network Utility it says "Network Utility is deprecated" – Refluent

yup, Network Utility has been deprecated since macOS Big Sur, using Terminal is now needed – Austral

What commands should we use in the terminal? – Diallage

Answer 6

If you are not on the same network you could use this third party tool called localtunnel

http://localtunnel.me/

It basically routes your content through another server and you access that.

Freon

This was already covered in an existing answer. – Trotskyism

Answer 7

Old question. New simple answer that worked for me me.

Connect your iPhone to your computer via USB.

Open System Preferences > Sharing.

Select Internet Sharing in the left tab. This should show your internet sharing controls on the right.

If the checkbox next to Internet Sharing is enabled, uncheck it.

On the right side of your Internet Sharing options, check iPhone USB.

Enable Internet Sharing by checking its checkbox. There may be a popup that asks you to confirm this action.

Find the message near the top that says, "Computers on your local network can access your computer at: xxxx.local. Make a note of what xxxx says – this is your computer’s name. You’ll be typing it into your address bar, so I recommend editing it into a short word.

you should now be able to access your localhost server from xxxx.local:yyyy, where xxxx is your name from the previous step and yyyy is your server’s port number.

Spike

Great updated answer, thanks. Notice yyyy is usually 3000 – Maragretmarala

Make sure your webserver is listening on 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 or localhost, otherwise your phone won't be able to connect to it. – Pakistan

Answer 8

If you're using MAMP, key in your IP address (let's say 192.0.0.63) in your iPhone Safari browser, followed by the port number 8888 (e.g. 192.0.0.63:8888) and you will be able to see your local site in your iPhone.

And if you're using a WAMP server, again in your iPhone safari browser just key in the IP address (let's say 192.0.0.63) and that's it. But don't forget to remove the deny from all from the httpd.conf file for your WAMP server. If you look for the line allow from 127.0.0.1, above it or below of it you will see deny from all; just delete this line and restart your WAMP server and that should to the job.

Mines

Port number of MAMP is depend on your settings in 'server' tab. – Burgher

I just want to add one note: If you tried and it didnt work, try to change the network to something else different, in my case, I switched to my 4G hotspot of my phone and it worked normally – Wendalyn

Answer 9

If You'd Rather Type A Hostname Instead of IP Address

First Option (Quick Way):

You should be able to navigate to http://my-macbook-pro.local/mywebsite on your iPhone. See https://mcmap.net/q/88046/-how-to-view-quot-localhost-quot-on-my-ipod-touch

This approach tends to work because the '.local' domain is a special reserved word.

Second Option:

See http://xip.io/, which is a free service and is super convenient. No config necessary.

Then when you browse to http://mysite.app.192.168.1.130.xip.io (using a browser on your server or on any device on your LAN), it will show the page hosted at 192.168.1.130.

And if you're running Homestead on the machine that exists at that IP, browsing to http://mysite.app.192.168.1.130.xip.io:44300 (with the port in the URL) somehow shows the page hosted on the Homestead Vagrant virtual machine at 192.168.10.10. Pretty amazing.

Third Option (which doesn't depend on a service and is flexible but more complicated and only works if you have a router with DD-WRT on it):

If you have one local server hosting multiple different sites that you'd like to access via different hostnames (via iPhone), you can do this.

1. In your OS, change the name of your computer to something short, meaningful, and easy to remember, such as "RYANDESK".
2. In your DD-WRT router settings:
   1. In Services > Services > Static Leases, set the MAC address of your server to point to a specific IP address, such as 192.168.1.108. Set its hostname to be the same as you named your computer earlier. "Client Lease Time" can be 1440 minutes.
   2. Be sure to press Save and also Apply Settings with every change. ("Save" doesn't seem to automatically apply the settings.) If you get an error, it's probably because the GUI design of DD-WRT is misleading, and you unnecessarily pressed "Add" for Static Leases.
   3. In DHCP Server > User Domain, choose "LAN & WAN". For "LAN Domain", set it to some short string, such as your initials without any punctuation (e.g. "xyz"). Probably avoid using the word "local" since there might be conflicts. Don't use real-world domains such as "com", "org", "net", etc.
3. In Services > Services > DNSMasq, enable DNSMasq and "Local DNS" and configure "Additional DNSMasq Options" to be something like: address=/project1.xyz/project2.xyz/192.168.1.108 (where xyz is whatever you chose in the earlier step, the IP points to the specific machine, and project1 and project2 are whatever hostname you want to point to each of those projects (such as different Nginx configs).
4. Ensure that your HOSTS file doesn't have any entries conflicting with what we've done. If you don't know what a HOSTS file is, you're probably fine.
5. Flush your DNS cache and release and renew your local IP. Switch into and out of Airplane Mode on iPhone to flush DNS cache there too.

6. Now you can browse to http://ryandesk.xyz in your iPhone (or in your desktop browser), and it will resolve to your local server. So hopefully you've set up your Nginx or Apache or whatever to be listening for that hostname.

   https://wiseindy.com/it/how-to-access-your-pcs-using-dns-names-with-dd-wrt/ http://www.howtogeek.com/69696/how-to-access-your-machines-using-dns-names-with-dd-wrt/

Maurinemaurise

Answer 10

WebpackDevServer localhost from iphone

If you are using an app which is running on node. you can use webpack as a build tool and use their built in devserver

You can use webpackdevserver to start your application from a localhost server and then pass in your localhost address and port of your choice.

webpack-dev-server --host 192.168.0.89 --port 3000

then from your iPhone you can access it using

http://192.168.2.89:3000

Note :: Your laptop and iPhone should be on the same network, and you should use your localhost ip address.

For Mac how to find ip address you can refer Get local IP address in node.js

Slimy

Answer 11

For Mac users, open up the Network Utility (You can find this by typing cmd + space which will open spotlight and then in spotlight start typing Network Utility). Select Network Utility, when it's open, your IP address will be found next to the label IP Address. So basically with the IP, you can get into any open ports on your local mac e.g. if your website is running locally on localhost:3000 and your ip address is 154.31.92.0 then from your phone you can get the website simply by typing 154.31.92.0:3000 into a browser.

PS- This only works if both phone and computer are on the same network

Domain

This worked great. In Network Utility I selected Wi-Fi instead of the default Ethernet and then my address was 10.0.1.3. On my Mac I had a program running at localhost:3004, so on the iPad I typed 10.0.1.3:3004 and I was able to view the site running locally on my Mac. For more complex cases with subdomains, such as demo.mysite.local:3004, I had success with DNSMasq, but it is a more complicated process. – Lainelainey

when I open Network Utility it says "Network Utility is deprecated" – Refluent

Go to System Preferences > Network > Wifi, IP address will be shown on the right side Wifi details. – Flume

Answer 12

If you are using mac (OSX) :

On you mac:

1. Open Terminal
2. run "ifconfig"
3. Find the line with the ip adress "192.xx.x.x"

If you are testing your website with the address : "localhost:8888/mywebsite" (it depends on your MAMP configurations)

On your phone :

1. Open your browser (e.g Safari)
2. Enter the URL 192.xxx.x.x:8888/mywebsite

Note : you have to be connected on the same network (wifi)

Millsap

Answer 13

For those of you that are using the correct IP address and you STILL aren't able to connect to the local server, one other thing to check is that you or your coworker didn't configure the device to use a proxy server.

I had one device that wouldn't connect, and it turned out that the device was configured to use Charles Proxy, which of course wasn't running.

Terle

Answer 14

You can use ip of computer instead http://localhost.

But it may be not accessible. You must edit the httpd.conf (or equivalent configuration file) of your server software. I do not have php installed right now but you can search with keyword: "Allow from or /Directory"

Note: IP of the PC where XAMPP is running should be a static IP(not assigned by DHCP), otherwise you have to check it manually every time you restart the PC.

Anthraquinone

Answer 15

I wanted to accomplish the same thing as the original request, and looked for an answer here, and turned off every firewall and virusprotection to no avail.

Then, I found the following statment regarding IIS express in the microsoft documentation: "IIS express does not serve requests to a browser on another computer, making its approval easier in corporate environments".

Bottom line - you will have to install IIS (not the delivered IIS express) to get your project to be seen outside your computer.

Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/58wxa9w5.aspx

Hope this is helpfull to other people that are going nuts turning off every security feature on their computer.

Desmoid

Answer 16

WIth WAMP:

1) you should click on WAMP icon>Put Online (wait till re-started).

2) Then (if you are WiFi on Iphone on same network), open your IP in iPhone browser

i.e. http://192.168.1.22 OR http://164.92.124.42

To find your local IP's:
a) click Start>Run>cmd and type ipconfig ,then you will see there.
OR
b) click the blue arrow and "lease new ip".

p.s. That's all. now you can access (open) localhost from Android or iPhone

Epiphragm

Answer 17

Find your system's IP address and on what port you are running the website.

Say your IP address is 121.300.00.250 and your port is 8080.

[Port number: see your web browser while running the page eg: localhost:8080/... then the port number is 8080]

Now in your mobile go to 121.300.00.250:8080/.. and you'll find your website.

IMPORTANT: You have to make sure that your server (e.g Apache Tomcat) is in started condition

Fujimoto

Answer 18

Local server machine: Linux

Accessing machine: iPad 13.5.1

I learned that the local server's host IP needs to be set to 0.0.0.0 for other machines to access it. To check, run sudo netstat -anp and look for your local server port. I found that it was running on 127.0.0.1 or localhost so other machines weren't able to access it. I changed my app configurations to run on host IP 0.0.0.0. I then used the <internetIP>:<port> to access the local server, and it worked

Volturno

Answer 19

If you are working on a php project you can change the base href:

<base href="<?php echo str_replace("localhost","192.x.x.x",HTTPS_SERVER);?>">

• localhost or 127.0.0.1: depending on your settings
• 192.x.x.x : your local ip address
• HTTPS_SERVER: the previous base href

Doing that is essential to load images, css and js files on your phone.

Blarney

Answer 20

If you go the route of going into your Network Settings and getting Wi-Fi IP address such as xxx.xxx.x.xxx:9000 (:9000 or whichever port is open), make sure your mobile device is also on that same Wi-Fi/signal IP address. I spent a day trying to get this to work and it didn't work until i switched my phone off the cellular network to the same Wi-Fi connection/IP address. Opened right up once I made this update.

Countable

Switching off mobile data made all the difference for me. Thanks! – Harker

Answer 21

1. Firstly, your have to confirm that you also access server api via your mac ip on mac browser. If not, make sure your server allow do that instead of just localhost (127.0.0.1) by runing your server on 0.0.0.0
2. Go to safari on iphone and make a get request by api your server serve: ex http://0.0.0.0/st. Safari auto redirect to server your mac runing (at your mac ip)
3. If you want to make request on your iphone app. It shoud be repalce requet 0.0.0.0 by [your mac/server ip]

Evette

Answer 22

Have a look at this answer, it discusses internally routing HTTP through direct Objective-C calls to an HTTP-capable layer/embedded web server (let's assume that the HTTP server code is within the same application that wishes to display the HTML within a web widget).

This has the advantage of being slightly more secure (and possibly faster) as no port(s) should be exposed.

Ria

Answer 23

There is a very simple way to achieve this:

1. Connect your phone and computer into the same LAN.
2. Window + R, then type ipconfig, then you get your current ip of ur pc, it looks like this: 192.168.XX.XX
3. Type this ip with your app port in your phone web browser like this: http://192.168.XX.XX:8080, it works

Note:

If that did not work. Turn off anti-virus software in your PC, if still not work, try turning off windows firewall, cuz the issue is related to PC firewall.

Surculose

Answer 24

Another quick and dirty way to do this on a mac is to open up xcode (if you have it installed) and run safari on your simulator. Typing localhost here will work as well.

Eraeradiate

Create an alias of the simulator app and start without Xcode: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Applications/Simulator.app. For me the best solution. 🙂 It's just simple, not dirty if Xcode is already installed (by iOS developers). – Coagulum

Answer 25

Steps:

I assume you have started the web server (apache tomcat on default port:8080).

On windows 10:

1. Open your antivirus, go to the firewall section, and locate port section and add a Local TCP/IP Port : 8080 to allow access
2. get the machine ip address from command prompt. (IPv4 Address)
3. Launch chrome from iPhone and goto ip address:8080 address.

Hope this helps.

Worshipful

Answer 26

From my iphone I wanted to browse a website hosted on IIS server on my Windows 8 laptop. After some reading around, I opened Windows Firewall, selected "Allow an app or feature through Windows firewall". Then scrolled down and checked "World Wide Web Services (HTTP)" from the list. That's all, it worked. Hope it helps someone else too.

Undecagon

Answer 27

In my case first i connected my pc and mobile on the same network, you can ping your mobile from pc to test the connection.

I running my project with GGTS(Groovy/Grails Tool Suite) locally then accessing website from mobile using PC IP address and it's work very well.

PS. running from local it would give url like (http://localhost:8080/projectname) you should replace localhost with PC IP address if you are trying to access your local website from mobile

Nestle

Answer 28

If you're on a mac make sure to edit your /etc/hosts file. Find the IP address per instructions above and add the following line to that file

172.x.xx.x.x outer

After that, the steps above worked: navigate to the right page in my iphone browser, visit http://172.x.xx.x.x:port http://www.imore.com/how-edit-your-macs-hosts-file-and-why-you-would-want

Dibbrun

Answer 29

The most convenient solution is to utilize ngrok. You can run ngrok with the following command: ngrok http --host-header=rewrite 4200.

Once ngrok is up and running, simply open the URL provided by ngrok in your iPhone browser. This allows you to easily expose your local development server to the internet and access it from anywhere.

PS: This works in both Windows/Mac/Android/Ios

Marielamariele